Something There Is That Doesn’t Love… Frontiers

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Something There Is That Doesn’t Love… Frontiers

DRAGOŞ AVĂDANEI

Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi

The “frontier” concept has been one that humans have struggled with from, probably, the very beginnings of history – not only as a line of separation between tribes, ethnic groups, nations and countries, but also as a cognitive existen- tial limit (see below a poet’s well-known commentary on the role of limits in communal, social existence); other walls – better known than Frost’s –, like the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, the Trojan Wall…, or the Berlin Wall for that matter, are challenging examples of man’s need to wall certain things out and other things in. The more than 4,300 years history of the world’s empires may be the first proof that man has never loved frontiers. More specifically, our paper fo- cuses on the American frontier metaphor, which was introduced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 academic paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, and elaborated in his 1921 volume The Frontier in American History. This concept – a metaphor and a challenge, or both – is then viewed in the context of American imperialism, American exceptionalism, the theory of Manifest Destiny, and the New Frontier/s of the 20^thand 21^stcenturies, the so-called open frontier – the genius of American nationality – becoming an authentic key to past, present, and future American history.

Keywords: frontier; challenge; metaphor; empire; exceptionalism; Manifest Destiny.

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efore remembering and bringing in Frost’s “Mending Wall” – a sagacious commentary on the role of boundaries/frontiers in individual and communal existence – our working title for this paper had been “Frontier: Metaphor and/or Challenge”, which is a more explicit description of what the concept and reality of the frontier stand for. We could have also appealed to “the philosophy of the limit” (a 1992 book by Drucilla Cornell, among others), but that would have required a volume-length study on deconstruction, postmodernism, identity and otherness and such others.

Our “title premise”, very much like any other one in this field for that matter, may always be subject of debate; there certainly are people – like the speaker’s neighbor in the Frost poem – who love frontiers; since it was quite a number of people who had decided, for instance, to spend millions of marks to build the 140-kilometer long Berlin Wall (beginning August 1961), and a 29 nr. 16 2/2015

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…

We keep the wall between us as we go…

There where it is we do not need the wall…

He only says ‘Good fences make good neighbors…’

Before I build a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out…

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

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number of other, many more people, who decided to tear it down almost thirty years later (Nov.

1989 to 1990), our premise remains dilemmatic. The more so as human history records many other such “frontier” walls, from Hadrian’s Wall in Britain and Trajan’s Wall in Dobruja, Romania to similar walls, at one time or another, in Turkey, Spain, Croatia, Egypt, Iran, Vietnam, Korea..., and, of course, to the Great Wall of China (almost 9,000 km long), which still stands (begun in the seventeenth century B.C., being built and rebuilt over and over again), but there must certainly have been people who did not like it in its long history. Even so, we stick to our (and Frost’s) af- terthought that man, in general – or “something” in him – does not like frontiers, whence his tendency to challenge them, cross them, push them, use, destroy, annihilate them, neglect, trespass or go beyond them.

For which we need to look at the concept more closely first; frontier (from the Latin frons,-tis= the brow, front) has – for the purposes of this paper – at least three more or less different dictionary meanings. It is, first, a border or confine of a country, a dividing line; its other synonyms here are edge, limit, bound, verge, perimeter; in this meaning, frontier also reflects the body of the rules that determine the political, juridical, social, economic, cultural and/or linguistic differ- ences between two countries and it is marked by customs, i.e. channels for crossing it, accompa- nied by certain laws, duties and restrictions, tolls, excises or taxes (or tributes) for businesses, trades and individuals; so very few people are expected to “love” this kind of frontier (especially when doubled by trenches, battlements, watchtowers, barbed wire or “beds of nails”, as in the case of the Berlin Wall, but not only). Second, frontier refers to a tract of land along a border of a country or wilderness at the edge of a settled area of a country; this tract, one needs to emphasize, is part of the civilized country (part of what is known, in view of later meanings) nearest to the uncivilized region (the unknownelement or component of the metaphor – see infra); and this is, remarkably, a transition zone, borderland or marches. And third, a frontier may refer to any new or incom- pletely investigated field of learning, thought, etc., an undeveloped area for discovery or research and indicating the limit of knowledge in a particular domain (as in “space – the final frontier”).

All these denotations (with their various connotations) convey the idea of finis, of the end of something, of sources of dispute, conflicts (and wars), with corresponding mental and emotional implications. On the other hand, having always marked the boundary between “here” and “over there”, between “this side” and “the other side”, between the “familiar” and the “strange/foreign”, between “mine” and “yours”, or, again, between “the known” and “the unknown” (I. A.

Richards’ “the vehicle” and “the tenor”), frontier also implied a zone of adaptation, learning, and innovation (see Kees van der Pijl, 2007), with representations that are, once again, both emotional or affective and cognitive.

And thus we are at the border (sic) of frontier as metaphor, a question that is more complex than it may seem. First, “frontier” itself isa metaphor as, whenever we use the word, “we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a/[this] single word” (Richards’

definition of metaphor, not “frontier”, 1950: 93); the famous Cambridge critic and philosopher sees metaphor as “the omnipresent principle of language”, as “thought [itself] is metaphoric”

and “words are the meeting points [the frontiers?] at which regions of experience… come together” (131). Next, the frontier is what separates (and unites, at the same time) the two halves of the metaphor, as a transfer (transgression? defection?) – meta+ phero/-ein= to carry over – between two concepts, entities or domains, most likely “over” a boundary, that temporarily separates the components; so metaphor is an equivalence established across a frontier that separates the two semantic/significant areas/spaces/territories/domains. Metaphor – especially cognitive metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson and many others) – is thus a question of crossing borders or frontiers, and understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another (otherness in terms of one’s own identity), with the even more suggestive concept of mappingbetween the source domain and the target domain (like between the American east and the American west, the known or conquered/settled area and the unknown, the mysterious/unsettled/dangerous/strange or foreign one). It is not difficult to go as far back as Aristotle and see that “metaphors have qualities of the

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exotic and the fascinating” (whence the imperial/-istic drive to conquer).

One could thus probably demonstrate that all human ideals and wishes, all human enterprises and attempts of all kinds are measured against one “frontier” or another; it has most often been (represented as) a place where you have to stop and prove your identity (hence the relationship between identity and otherness), or a line which you are tempted to cross over (unnoticed), as a risk you want to take – a challenge pictured as an interdiction, a forbidden space, territory or domain. In order to know the world (Richards’ “tenor”), with all its mysteries, you need a “vehicle”, that is a “stage” (As You Like It, II-7), which you study, learn and know about and then jump/drive over into the world itself in the hope of knowing it, too, on the basis of the knowledge you have about the “stage”.

Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual/cognitive metaphor simply allows one to think of nations as containers, with borders or frontiers, beyond which “otherness” is represented as an enemy or potential attacker, an outsider, of course, a stranger/foreigner who does “not have the same rights as our fellow citizens” (Aristotle in The Rhetoric). If there is any “blending” on the frontier (in its second meaning, of region or zone or borderland), that is first of all linguistic (bilinguals, plus mixed vocabularies and syntax, as in “long time no see”, for instance, generously imported by the conquerors into their own language) and conceptual (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s “conceptual blending”, and “mental space theory”); from Aristotle, through Ni- etzsche, Peirce and Richards, to Wayne Booth, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Paul Ricoeur, Max Black, George Lakoff… and dozens of other writers, metaphor and “frontier” have been associated in a variety of relevant ways.

Finally, frontier (in its first two meanings) has become a cultural metaphor for an American phenomenon that historians and critics have confronted for more than one century; along with other “American metaphors”, like the “melting pot” (the process of assimilation of immigrants), the “salad bowl” (the mixed entities maintain their integrities in a rich diversity), and the “mosaic”

(the pieces fitting together to form a beautiful picture), plus the lesser known “tributaries metaphor” (for a cultural watershed) and the “tapestry” one (threads woven together), “frontier”

has turned into an elastic concept/metaphor for American expansion, marshaling such other in- sistently used ideas as “exceptionalism”, “manifest destiny”, the “new frontier”, “global space”, and imperialism as such.

One gets thus close to implying that thinking by metaphor – a fundamental type of thinking – is more or less thinking imperialistically, i.e. in terms of trespassing, transgressing, invading, oc- cupying, violating, infringing, and annexing (“imperial history as world history” and metaphor history as history of human thought – see Burbank and Cooper). That may or may not be so, but what is certain is that for more than 4,300 years the empire makers (the Khans, Caliphs and Pharaohs, the Alexanders, Augustuses and Caesars – with the related Kaisers and czars –, the other sultans, kings and emperors) have proved that (great) men do not love frontiers; even before they existed or were named frontiers, people hated the idea of borders of all kinds, which always represented a challenge, so one may not be surprised (see supra) to discover that a history of mankind may very well be (re-)written as a history of empires, whether they be real, political ones or maritime empires, transnational corporations, enterprises or organizations.

As far as existing human records go, territorial empires (from Latin imperium= rule, command, authority, control, power, dominion) – which also involved culturally and ethnically distinct po - pulations – have been listed (see “List of Empires” on the net) as almost two hundred real empires and thirteen “possible” or potential empires (self-proclaimed and often short-lived spheres of influence, like the Athenian Empire – 478-404 B.C., the American and Soviet modern empires…).

The oldest ancient one was the Akkadian Empire (2300 to 2200 B.C.) in Mesopotamia, followed by the Babylonian Empire (1900-1600 B.C.), the Egyptian Empire (1570-1070 B.C.), the Neo- Assyrian Empire (916-612 B.C.), the Achaemenid or Persian Empire (550-330 B.C.), the Mace- donian and Roman Empires; Medieval empires included this last one (27 B.C.-1453 A.D.), the Mongol Empire (Genghis Khan), the Umayyad Caliphate, Chinese and Arab-Muslim empires,

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the Byzantine and the Eastern Roman empires; while the most numerous have been the “modern”

empires, including the British Empire (the largest in all history), the Ottoman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire (dissolved in 1806), the Russian Empire (1721-1917), the Austro-Hungarian Em- pire, the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Brazilian… ones, and, finally, there have been dozens of other empires like the Aztec, Moroccan, Afghan, Algerian, Pe- ruvian, Bulgarian, Moravian, Anatolian, Belgian, Korean, Khmer, Syrian, Armenian, Swedish, Nigerian… empires.

Studies in the field of transnational/trans-frontiers history (Christian Palloix, Nicos Poulantzas, Alfred Sohn-Rethel…) are ultimately summed up (by Kees van der Pijl, for instance) in modes of foreign relations, from tribal relations to empire/nomad ones, to modern interna- tional relations and to the most recent relations of “global governance” – all of them in defiance of frontiers. Van der Pijl even sees the “subterranean attraction [of the frontier] as the place where the ‘barbarian’ lurks” (2007: 213), with imperialism working to absorb “the barbarian”

counterpart into the dominant culture, producing hybrid identities and split loyalties (see also Norbert Elias’ 1987 The Civilizing Process…on the same theme); in fact, this interaction inside/out- side provides the occasion for a real history of empires in the third chapter of Pijl’s book (Nomads, Empires…) and for prophetic commentaries in the last one, on supranational institutions (like the U.N.) of global governance and what is happening now in Europe.

“United in diversity”, the continent with the highest number of frontiers (cultures, languages, life-styles, customs, values…) has finally come to see them, paradoxically, as locations symbolizing the process of European integration; frontiers – which Europeans seem to no longer tolerate – are now regarded as “the scars of history”, or, more mildly, as “the coded history of Europe”, as real obstacles or painful memories, with the whole map of the continent being gradually (and, sometimes, painstakingly) re-drawn/-written; the argument seems to be implicitly based upon the idea that if the U.S. citizens can always cross the frontiers of their fifty states, the Europeans might just as well do the same – which introduces the very specific situation of North America (and which is not only the United States, but Mexico and Canada as other special cases; Canada, in particular, as such historians as Harold Adams Innis and J. M. S. Careless have shown, devel- oped as a history of the relationships between center and periphery).

The U.S. has already been mentioned as a “possible empire”, but it should also be immediately described as a more “metaphoric culture” than Europe, for instance (with whom it may be regarded as being in a metaphorical relationship); for which we can have a look not only at American expansionism, but also at American exceptionalism, the Manifest Destiny mindset, and the Fron- tier Thesis.

American imperialism includes both components of our “working title” – frontier as metaphor, together with U.S. role in the world and its influence (cultural and other) on other countries, and challenge, i.e. the expansion into other/foreign territories. Historian Sidney Lens (1912-1986) writes (in 1971) a history of American imperialism, starting from the conquest of the continent (the Atlantic Ocean was the first frontier) to the birth of the U.S. as a world power, including the Cold War and Vietnam; his book gives us, first, a nation motivated by a desire for supremacy over the world, that has conducted more than 160 wars and other military ventures, from Mexico to Lebanon and Kosovo, from China to the Dominican Republic, from Haiti and Nicaragua to Vietnam, East Timor and Iraq, from Guam to the Virgin Islands, Mariana Islands, Samoa, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the Panama Canal zone, Palau, Micronesia, Korea, Afghanistan and Syria; one could add that as of 2003 (second edition of Lens’ book) the U.S.

has had bases in almost forty countries worldwide.

The first “imperial metaphor” was John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon known as the “City upon a Hill”, as a shining example to the Old World and thus the so-called American exceptionalism (the theory that the U.S. occupies a special place among the nations of the world, as the “first new nation” constructed on the basis of liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, republicanism, democracy and laissez-faire) has Puritanical roots in the doctrines of Calvinist predestination and

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Divine Providence, and continues with Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” (an oxymoron?), Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835/1840 Democracy in America(the U.S. was “proceeding along a path to which no limit/no frontier/can be perceived…”) and, unsurprisingly, the American Communist Party (no wonder the concept came to be associated with the Nazis’ rhetoric of the chosen, superior race and Lebensraum).

But American exceptionalism was even more tightly tied to the idea of Manifest Destiny, coming from the same belief in the special virtues of the American people and their institutions and their sense of mission to redeem the (Old) World; the concept was coined by newspaper ed- itor John O’Sullivan in 1845, specifically to justify the War with Mexico and the annexation of the Republic of Texas (in 1847 as a fact), but also following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 (which doubled the size of the U.S.) and the territorial expansion after the war of 1812 (Florida purchased from Spain in 1829, the Monroe doctrine of 1823, according to which the Western hemisphere was no longer open for European colonization, the annexation of Oregon in 1844, the Mexican Cession of Alta California and Nuevo Mexico to the U.S. in 1848, plus calls for the annexation of “all Mexico”), and preceding the Homestead Act of 1862, by which 600,000 families were en- couraged to settle “West”, and so on.

With the Americans thus preordained to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, the frontier was taken to mean any part of the (forested) interior of the continent lying beyond the fringe of existing settlements (Jamestown – 1607, Massachusetts Bay – 1620…) along the coast and the great rivers (St. Lawrence, Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna and James);

this involved not only a space of unlimited, unexplored resources, but also a site of closeness and conflict (the Trail of Tears and the movement West of Indian Tribes, the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, following the Civil War itself, forts and outposts and cowboys, Indian reserva- tions…), and, ultimately, a safety-valve (obviously, for the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world) after all.

Seeing the American frontier as a cultural expression of life in the American westward expansion, cultural critic, historian and novelist Richard Slotkin comments on its role in the Amer- ican “regeneration through violence”, as “frontiers breed frontiers” (A. B. Hulbert), both meaning that this “genius of American nationality” continues into the 20^thand 21^stcenturies, as this people continues to pioneer “intellectual, social, and political [metaphoric] frontiers” (Hulbert, 1929:

246). As we shall presently see, this “open frontier” has been the key to American history (Morris Cohen) of past, present, and future; in his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination in 1960 John F. Kennedy spoke of the “New Frontier”: “We stand today on the edge of a new frontier…, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils – a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats”, i.e. “uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, un- conquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus…

[which] demand invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking you to be pioneers on the New Frontier” (qtd. in White and Limerick, 1994: 81). Twenty years later, during the 1982 Independence Day Celebration, Ronald Reagan agreed: “the conquest of new frontiers is a crucial part of our national character” (84).

We come closest to our “frontier thesis” with Ray Allen Billington’s “frontier heritage” book, where he writes about the three-century-long process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism, democracy, and upward social mobility. What he does, in fact, is to paraphrase one of the most influential documents on the American West and one of America’s foundational frontier narratives that had an enormous impact on historical scholarship and the American mind in general. This is “The Significance of the Frontier in Amer- ican History”, an academic paper read on July 12, 1893 at the meeting of the American Historical Association, convened in conjunction with the slightly belated (1893 rather than 1892) World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, an enormous fair to mark the four-hundredth an- niversary of Columbus’ voyage; later that year it was published in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, then in the Report of the American Historical Associationfor 1893, and re-printed

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with additions in the Fifth Year Book of the National Herbart Society; it was then elaborated in a series of essays and history lectures (at Wisconsin and Harvard universities) and republished (with twelve other papers) as the first chapter of The Frontier in American Historyin 1921. Its author was Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), professor at Wisconsin (1890-1910) and Harvard (1911- 1922), who was confessedly influenced by Emerson, Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley; except for this “Frontier Thesis”, Turner is also remembered for his “Sectional Hypothesis” – a composite of such social forces as ethnicity and ownership and their role in (American) history.

Though he admits there is a human fascination (acceptance or rejection) with the frontier, Turner insists upon its American uniqueness and specificity; whereas with most other nations such developments across frontiers occurred in limited areas (like the fortified boundaries of Eu- rope, “running through dense populations” – 3), in America “we have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions” (9), so that this frontier established liberty by releasing (safety-valve) Americans from European mindsets.

The first settlers certainly acted and thought like Europeans, but the new environmental changes made them react upon the Old World and forget or ignore its institutions (established churches, aristocracy, intrusive governments, class-based land distribution), soon moving toward intolerance of hierarchy, becoming more individualistic and violent, less artistic and scientific, and more dis- trustful of authority; thus the frontier represents “the line of most rapid and effective Ameri- canization” (3-4), as “moving westward, [it] became more and more American” (4). As each generation of pioneers (traders, fishermen, ranchers, miners, cattle-raisers, and farmers) moved west, they abandoned these useless European institutions, practices, and ideas and found new solutions to the new problems created by the new environment.

As “the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward”

(22), i.e. westward, it provided the core defining quality of the United States, and that is American democracy; and this “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (3) (the two halves of the metaphor) kept moving, from “the first official frontier of the Massachusetts Bay” (39), up the Atlantic river courses just beyond the “fall line” (9) and the tidewater region (in the 17th century), to the Allegheny Mountains, the Ohio and Shenandoah valleys, up the Mohawk into Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee (in the 18th century), then into Indiana, Illinois and Louisiana, by the Great Lakes and across the Mississippi, Missouri and beyond, over the arid lands of the Great Plains and the deserts to the Rocky Mountains, south to Florida, west again and north-west through Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, California and Oregon (in the 19th century) – each frontier “won by a series of Indian wars” (9), and “thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness” (13). The dubious (and consequently challenged – see infra) premise was “the existence of an area of free land…” (1, our italics) resulting in a psychological sense of unlimited opportunity.

Still, most importantly, the frontier (in its second dictionary meaning, as tract of land or wilderness at the edge of a settled area; borderland or marches) and its conditions called out not only democracy, but also such American characteristics as “coarseness and strength” (37), “acute- ness and inquisitiveness” (37), a “practical [and] inventive turn of mind” (37), “restless[ness]”

and “nervous energy” (37), individualism, exuberance, informality, violence and crudeness, “con- fidence and scorn of older society” (38) and “impatience […] to its lessons” (38), shedding of restraints, optimism and future orientation, “grasp of material things” (37), empiricism, courage, independence, equality, naturalism…; it seems almost impossible to find other “traits of profound importance” (37) shaping the American character as a result of the frontier experiences of crossing the continent and winning a wilderness.

One of the problems is that, becoming aware of all these positive effects, the Americans after Turner may really fall in love with the frontier (contradicting our title) and attempt to find it else- where (after its official closing in the 1890 U.S. Census that Turner himself lamented in his paper);

though this was the physical frontier that the Census Bureau declared as having broken up, there remained the mental frontier, consisting in a fear of the loss of an imaginative space that could

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rhetorically and conceptually structure American nationalism (in fact, twenty-five years later, in his 1921 book, Turner himself envisaged future figurative frontier spaces: “In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored…” – 300). And, of course, one could not account for the main traits of the Americans who came to the U.S. after 1890 unless they were discovered to face the frontiers of literary, scientific, technological, political, and social projects in the 20th century; like the new “electronic frontier”, for instance, of the Internet or the World Wide Web, of cyberspace and of outer space (“the final frontier”).

The 1921 “Preface” also points out what might be viewed as a historical feedback: the Amer- ican frontier experience “even reacted upon the Old World and influenced the direction of its thought and its progress” (xii) – something very few people would deny; and thus, back to the 1893 thesis and its consequences: “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society” (11) by and large.

But Turner could not have been completely right in what he discovered about the frontier;

so, “A Criticism of the Turner Thesis” by George Wilson Pierson (1942) reveals other factors in American development which should be rightfully acknowledged, like gender and race and class (drastically downplayed by Turner), the fact that “the thesis” left no room for victims and the oppression of minority groups, plus the imperialist nature of the expansion as such. In 1950 (Virgin Land) Henry Nash Smith points out that the Turnerian romantic myth or metaphor of the garden shows a total distrust of the role of cities and industry (joined a little later by Richard Wade in his 1959 Urban Frontiers– the idea that such “western” cities like Pittsburgh, Louisville or Cincinnati were the catalysts for western expansion). Most critics, however, focus on the fact that “the way West” was not really one into an empty space, and thus the Native Americans were elided, together with women, whom Turner completely ignored (Glenda Riley in a 1993 article);

his frontier looked very much like an exclusively male phenomenon, in which man confronted the virgin land (Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land…). Finally, Richard Slotkin, Patricia Nelson Limerick and Gloria Anzaldúa condemn the overlooking of violence in the American frontier mythology, the frontier as a racial conflict or a space of hatred, anger and exploitation.

In spite of all these (and other critical positions), Turner’s essay seems to remain the most influential piece of writing in the history of American history (being taken over not only by historians, but also in popular histories, motion pictures and novels); this ideology of frontierism and frontierist thinking (presidents Hoover, Kennedy, Reagan…) may also be seen in the 1994/1995 (again a delayed commemoration, this time of the century of Turner’s “epochal essay”) exposition The Frontier in American Culture, organized by the American Library Association in cooperation with the Newberry Library, and touring about seventy sites across the nation through 1998; the concept of marketing the Frontier belonged to Professor Richard White (University of Wash- ington) who, with Patricia Nelson Limerick, also published a book of that title, including their two essays as well as exhibition posters, photographs, paintings and drawings representing popular images of the American West – cowboys, Indians, log cabins, wagon trains… (foremost among them those of Buffalo Bill Cody’s “Wild West Show”, also present at the 1893 exposition and, incidentally, entertaining a much wider audience than Turner’s reading).

So, more than one hundred years after the concept was launched, one could conclude that Americans in particular and humans in general may or may not love frontiers, but, if they love them, it is mostly only because they plan to cross them, disregard or confront them, challenge them; and thus our working title may be interpreted as both valid and slightly redundant, because both frontier and challenge are part of metaphor and metaphoric thinking.

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WEB SOURCES:

Frederick Jackson Turner, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI Reader, at the Wisconsin Electronic Reader, [Last accessed: March 2015].

List of Empires, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires, [Last accessed: March 2015].